Too Much Time in the Bubble

A quick but useful read on taking lessons from other professions. Good stuf from Morgan Housel.

Most of us spend too much time in the bubble of our own professions, unaware of how much there is to learn from other fields. A lot of jobs fall under the category of “trying to figure out what other people want,” so many ideas from one field transfer to another.

Here are a few takeaways from various professions that are relevant to business and investing.

Poet: Quality does not scale with the number of inputs. You can make a more powerful point in 10 words than you can 10,000.

Doctor: The cumulative effects of small daily habits – both good and bad – add up to something enormous over time.

Politician: The winner is not always the most accurate, but the most persuasive.

A four-minute-mile pace is just not that fast. It’s fifteen miles per hour. Anyone young and reasonably athletic ought to be able to run that quickly, for at least fifty yards or so. You can’t hit a Roger Federer forehand once; you can’t even approximate it. It is forever out of reach. But most of us, at some point in our lives, can for a few fleeting moments propel ourselves forward at Roger Bannister’s pace.

Amazon’s site is notoriously complex. But as the author Jason Brush says, “successful design is not necessarily beautiful.”

Amazon’s visual design might not be streamlined, minimal, beautiful, or engage people on an emotional level, but it is immensely useful. Its functionality and corresponding aesthetic are tailored expressly to support the core attributes of an efficient shopping experience. Indeed, Amazon could almost be described as a sort digital Brutalism: it is straightforward and efficient, with a near-utopian aspiration to meet people’s needs in the least fussy way possible.

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